Serendipity 0.7 released

[garvinhicking]

The Serendipity team is happy to announce the immediate availability of Serendipity 0.7.

Serendipity is a PHP-powered weblog application, aiming at giving you an easy way to maintain your own individual diary or personal homepage.

The development of Serendipity is based upon offering a flexible, expandible and easy-to-use framework. We use a sophisticated Plugin architecture, affecting both the appearance of your blog and its core features. It ships with a variety of plugins (31 bundled with the distribution) to plug-and-play with your blog.

Wordpress/Textpattern users might favor Serendipity because of its vast functionality and flexible expandability without the hassle to edit core files. Moveable-Type users might appreciate the fact of our BSD-style licensing and the speed and functionality of dynamically generated pages.

Serendipity offers all of the following features and many more:

CORE FEATURES:

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* WYSIWYG-Editor
* Image and File-Asset-manager
* multiple users
* threaded comments, comment+trackback moderation
* nested categories, post to multiple categories
* XML-RPC interface to Blogger and MT-API
* powerful Plugin API to both affect custom sidebar items as well as 'event hooks' to trigger any kind of custom functionality nearly anywhere inside Serendipity
* dynamic page generation with 'pretty URLs'
* track- and pingback autodiscovery,
* multiple database support (MySQL, MySQLi, PostgreSQL, SQLite)
* can be used as shared library to host multiple blogs
* effective anti-spam-measurements (automoderation, captchas, ...)
* Skinable via structured CSS-elements
* Standards compliant: XHTML, CSS2, RSS 0.93/1.0/2.0, Atom 0.3, Conditional get support for XML-Feeds
* Flexible input: Choose between entering HTML, Textile, Wiki and/or BBCode markup, even for user-made comments
* Can import RSS-feeds to ease up migration
* Easy upgrading and updating without having to mangle with SQL-files
* Internationalization (German, English, Danish, Czech, partially: French, Dutch, Portuguese ...) - easy language addition/translation
* Open Source license: BSD-style

To wrap it up: Serendipity can do anything you want to get done with a blog, as easy as that. If you want more information, visit our Wiki on http://www.s9y.org/.

The latest 0.7 release vastly improves the featurebase of Serendipity.

A complete list of changes for this release can be found in our NEWS file, located in our CVS Repository. Here are the most important changes since 0.6:

NEW FEATURES:

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* Threaded comments (viewmode can be toggled by the visitor), comment+trackback moderation
* Post to multiple categories
* Nested categories
* Configuration in native language of the blog, uses your Browser's language settings for auto-detection
* Multi-User interface with three userlevels: ADMIN, CHIEF-EDITOR and EDITOR. Assign entries and categories to individual users.
* Categories can have icons associated to them
* Image manager can now handle other file formats and subdirectories
* Redesigned admin interface for editing entries, searching/filtering entries now possible
* MySQLi and SQLite support
* iconv engine will be used for UTF-8 conversion, where available
* All core images can now be altered via the templating mechanism

PLUGINS:

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* NEW serendipity_event_spamblock: Many anti-spam measurements, including captchas and link-checking.
* NEW serendipity_plugin_remoterss: Embed a foreign RSS or OPML-bloroll feed within your blog
* NEW serendipity_event_karma: Per-Entry uservoting, per-entry clickstatistics
* NEW serendipity_event_entrylinks: Show incoming/outgoing links for the detailed article view
* NEW serendipity_event_blogpdf: Export your full blog, a specific article, a specific category or a whole month to PDF
* NEW serendipity_event_livesearch: Enhances the ((Quick Search)) to show the results of the search on-the-fly
* NEW serendipity_event_searchhighlight: Highlights words of your entries for visitors which were refered from searchengines like Google, MSN, ...
* NEW serendipity_event_spamblock: Basic spam protection for comments, can be enhanced easily for your own filtering code.
* FIXED serendipity_event_trackexits: Can no longer be misused to track statistics of foreign links sent to exit.php
* FIXED serendipity_event_bbcode: Can now pretty-print code/php blocks
* HTML Nuggets can be configured to only show up in article overview, article detail or both
* Plugin API: Plugins can register the event-hook 'external_plugin' to spawn individual content outside of the blog layout (see livesearch/blogpdf plugin)
* Plugin API: A sidebar plugin can now return false to instruct the plugin API to NOT display the item on a sidebar. Allows optional sidebar plugins to be only shown on specific parameters.
* Plugin API: Allow each sidebar plugin to get individual CSS classes
* Plugin API: Defaults for configuration values now possible

SECURITY:

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* Fixed possible SQL injections [fixed in 0.7-beta2]
* Fixed possible HTTP response splitting [fixed in 0.7-rc1]

FIXED BUGS:

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* Verbose trackback-autodiscovery output after posting an entry
* Better RSS import (toggle draft state, category association)
* Improved XMLRPC API
* RSS UTF-8 compatibility for blogs using UTF-8 as their main charset
* Some minor issues for full Windows-Server compatibility (strftime, ...)
* Fixed wrong proportions when resizing small images
* Fixed javascript error when submitting comments with "remember me" checkbox
* Better default file permissions
* Fixed HTML generation for trackback discovery when using Wiki-Markup
* More XHTML 1.1 compatibility
* An entries' Last Modified timestamp will get updated if a comment is made to it, but only if the article is newer than 7 days.
* Trackback autodiscovery will only fetch files smaller than 150kb to preserve bandwidth
* Missing entity encoding for blogtitle/subtitle for RSS feeds
* "Pretty URL generation" will now seperate words using '-' instead of '_' for better indexing
* Added detection for support of 'php_value' directives so that no 'Error 500' are generated.
* Fixed some PostgreSQL issues.
* Pagination for multiple pages for categories/search results/entries now works properly.
* The RSS guid has changed to not contain the entry title, so that RSS Clients will not toggle an item as updated when only the title has changed. This change may mark all your RSS feed's entries as unread once after upgrading.
* Make use of Rewrite Base to properly activate mod_rewrite.

NEW LANGUAGES:

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* French
* Czech
* Dutch
* Portugues (brasilian)
* Bulgarian

TEMPLATES / CSS:

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* New Templates: mt3-chalkboard, idea, mt-rusty
* New CSS Class: .serendipity_msg_important, .serendipity_msg_notice for status messages
* New CSS Class: Now each sidebar plugin item will get a CSS class name added to the default "serendipitySideBarContent" one, which is called 'sidebar_wrap_', 'sidebar_title_', 'sidebar_content_' and then the original class name of the plugin appended. I.e.: 'sidebar_wrap_serendipity_html_nugget_plugin'. This allows special customization of any individual sidebar item.
* New CSS Class: .serendipity_comments for the comments block on full article view
* New CSS Class: .serendipity_admin_filters, .serendipity_admin_list_item_even, .serendipity_admin_list_item_uneven for the browse facility in administration-entries area
* New CSS Class: .serendipity_entryIcon for an image that can be assigned to each article of a certain category
* Calendar's CSS code is better structurized

HOW TO UPDATE:

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The update from a previous Serendipity release is easy: Download the latest distribution, unpack it to your existing folder, open the Admin panel of your blog, say hello to our update script and let it do its work. And then you're done! To be on the safe side, we suggest to make a backup of both your files and database before.

MIGRATE:

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If you want to upgrade from a different blog application like Word Press or Moveable Type, you can use the RSS import facility to preserve your entries. Look at our Wiki on ((http://www.s9y.org/53.html)) to see instructions.

Download latest release

[aim]

Wordpress/Textpattern users might favor Serendipity because of its vast functionality and flexible expandability without the hassle to edit core files.

That's great. But how could I, WP user, import my posts from WP to S9Y?

[garvinhicking]

In the 0.7 release you can import your Posts via the "RSS Import" feature. So you just give it the full feed of your blog; Romulus23 (www.romulus23.de) has done that successfully.

However in our upcoming 0.8 release (already quite usable via CVS) you can natively import all WP userdata, comments and entries; so you might want to give that a try!

Regards,
Garvin

[Charpress]

We reviewed your latest release at Blogger Forum.

We were quite impressed with Serendipity and I think the review by Rocksolid on our site is quite favorable.

We have Serendipity installed in a test site to be able to compare it with other platforms.

You might want to check out the review at www.bloggerforum.com and then look at Articles and Reviews.

There has also been some discussion on our boards about Serendipity. You might want to take a look and see if you want to add anything. I think there have been some complaints about reaching your .org site.

[garvinhicking]

Thanks a lot for letting us know! Just like commented in your article, our s9y.info site is currently the only one reachable -- s9y.org has DNS trouble and our sysadmins were not yet able to fix the problems.

Let's keep in touch,
Garvin.

[SecretSurfer]

s9y.org has DNS trouble and our sysadmins were not yet able to fix the problems

If you need some additional Nameserver (for free), please let me know. It would be a honor for us helping you and your business!